Saturday, July 23, 2016

Why You Need Many, Many Drafts

People keep asking me, how do
you write a book? Obviously there is some weird notion that those who know how
to write a book possess some special skills and knowledge that others don’t
have. I am of course talking about non-fiction books, fiction is really a whole
other ball-game and something I personally am still struggling with. But when
it comes to non-fiction, while most people know how to write a blog post, when
faced with writing an entire book, it’s almost as if they freeze up entirely
and can’t think how to proceed.

I believe that while writing a
book isn’t exactly easy, it’s difficult in different ways than people think.
Its more the size of it, the tenacity and persistence that is needed, and that
there are a whole lot of problems that come up while writing that one needs to
troubleshoot. I think that the main difference between someone who has written
a book and one who hasn’t, is the former has a bag of tricks that she pulls out
to get through the different parts. And when you get stuck, it’s because you
have either forgotten to use a tried-and-tested trick, or you need a new one.

And today, I discovered one
that I was inadvertently using without realizing, and because I didn’t
recognize it, I wasn’t making the most of it in the book I am working on at
present.

So the project that I am
working, which I may have mentioned a few times, is the revision of a book I
published earlier. Parts of the book are actually not that different from the
first edition, just some tweaks and line editing, and just generally going over
to make it read better. Other parts are completely different, where I have
broken chapters up into separate ones, or pulled bits from different chapters
into one. Right now I have the structure finalized, and about half the chapters
completely or almost completely edited and proofread. The other half of the
book - that’s a different story.

My usual writing process, and
one that I recommend to others, is to tackle the easiest bits of a project
first. There is always a lot of resistance to working, at least for me, and
being able to do the easiest bits always helps me to get going and make
progress. So basically I am sure by now you can guess where this is going. The
chapters that weren’t too different from the first draft, where I just had to
make small changes, those are done or mostly done by now. The chapters which I
basically had to re-write completely, those are the ones I am avoiding working
on now, because they are less ‘done’, less polished, and there are many questions
and issues to resolve.

The thing is, when I am
avoiding working on a chapter, or feel overwhelmed by some piece of writing, I
don’t consciously tell myself, this work is unpolished, or this is missing
something. What I feel is this sense of dread, and I quickly run away from the
work. If I do manage to force myself to work on something, I sometimes just
stare at the words on the screen (in the case of something that I have at least
a rough draft of), or just stare at the blank screen. I give up pretty quickly
because I know nothing much is going to happen there.

The other day though, I had
this epiphany. Now as all a-ha moments, this one seems pretty obvious, but it
wasn’t to me until it was, if that makes sense. I realized that the chapters of
this book that I was ok with working on, dare I say even the ones I enjoyed or
were happy with, were mostly ones that I had done many more drafts of than the
other chapters. Either because they were not very different from the original
book, or because somehow I had worked on them more. So they were more polished
- in terms of structure, the way they were laid out, and better edited at the
paragraph level. So I preferred to work on them, because I felt reasonably
confident while editing them - I only had to do some simple tweaks.

On the other hand, the chapters
I was avoiding working on were ones that I had recently re-written, in some
cases done some new research, or broken up so much that they didn’t resemble
anything like the previous version of that chapter. They were far from
polished. And I was scared of working on them. And when I probed myself and
asked exactly what it was I was afraid of, I realized it was something very
simple, but very powerful nevertheless.

I was afraid that I couldn’t
get it to a polished level. In one draft.

Now I never stipulated that I
had to do it in one draft, but it was implied. This project was already taking
too much time, I had stopped and started several times, and even while I was
giving it focused attention, it wasn’t moving forward as fast as I would like.
And I now realized why. It was a vicious cycle really. I wanted the project to
move forward so I was pressuring myself to finish the chapter every time I
worked on it. And knowing that I had to do it quickly, I got panicky and
blocked and found myself unable to work on it.

In her excellent book 7 Secretsof the Prolific, Hillary Rettig teaches this notion of the writer-copter; you
basically work on a piece, and when you’re struggling, you just move on (in the
writing helicopter) and work on another part of the project. She also talks
about the importance of doing several drafts. I have read that book several
times and I did agree with this notion of doing many drafts, but obviously it
didn’t really sink in. But once I made the connection between doing more drafts
and actually being able to handle difficult chapters (or rather that a chapter
was difficult just because I had done fewer drafts of it), I actually felt like
I found the secret to several of my writing problems, at least for this book.

I keep a table where I note
what stage I am in with a specific chapter (and if really struggling then I
break it down into sections). Usually once I move on from a stage, I note that.
The stages are different from drafts, it is more like different aspects - so
outline, rough draft, editing, checking for structural or argument level
problems, etc. Once I figured I just need more passes at the material, I
figured I would make that explicit. So I added in some columns in my table to
reflect that - and note which ones I thought were done and which ones needed a
few more drafts.

So, to get back to the topic of
this post - which is why you need many, many drafts. I find that when I
explicitly tell myself that I have to get this section of the work in shape
within a single draft, or at best two or three, I feel pressured and slow down
and try to get every sentence perfect before I move on. Sometimes you don’t
know what’s wrong with a section, but you come back later, and suddenly its
clear. Or you work on another chapter and give this one another pass, and it
makes more sense. You need to give yourself permission to go over the work as
many times as it takes, till it feels polished.

Won’t
this take forever? How will you ever get any deadlines met? Actually I think
this will make it easier to meet deadlines. Instead of avoiding the work and
making tea and doing everything possible but write, you can sit down to work
secure in the knowledge that as soon as one paragraph is troubling, you can
just jump to something else. You can cycle around the work, in no particular
order, or in a methodical way, and then get back to the bit that was tough.
Chances are, you may not be done with it, but you made some more progress. And
with this method, I am sure you can procrastinate less, and get the work
completed in less time, with far better results. Try it and let me know how it
went.